General Election 2015: With so much disillusionment, who can mend our broken hearts?

We are not apathetic. We are heartbroken. It’s time the pollsters, pundits and politicians understood that, with days to go to an election.

We are like a man or a woman who has been let down too many times before. Someone who has loved with a passion in the past and honestly believed that love could change the world, but has had their heart cracked by a parade of feckless fools.

We’ve been hurt so often it is hard to trust again. Isn’t that right?

You could see it in the Question Time special the other night, when voters finally got to have it out face to face with three men who had been flirting with them so desperately: Dave, Nick and Ed.

“Do you comprehend how much respect you would get if you were truly honest?” demanded one angry audience member, as if having a row with a cheat at a bus stop in the rain.

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Russell Brand had already tried explaining it to Ed Miliband a few days earlier, but got a bit confused. “It certainly isn’t apathy, Ed. It’s a sense of ‘What’s the point?’.”

Sounds like apathy to me, but actually this is deeper, more heartfelt, more active than that. More than half of those who chose not to vote in 2010 said they did not trust politicians or that all the parties were the same, according to research by a Survation poll. Other polls have detected similar feelings among those who did vote.

The sense of profound disillusionment was vivid all the way through the leaders’ debates, as those given the chance to ask questions sank their teeth into their suitors.

How did it come to this? Scandals played their part, of course, but a longer view says it started after we fell head over heels in love with Margaret Thatcher in her prime.

I don’t mean everybody, obviously. My own first political memories are of canvassing with my dad, a councillor in the East End of London at a time when Labour and the Tories would go to the pub for a pint after debates, because their post-war generation had a common cause. Thatcher and Scargill smashed all that. They polarised us.

Still, the turnout was 76 per cent when she came to power in 1979 and it stayed around that level until after she had gone. So what I mean by “we” is the broad sweep of society, the many who fell for the twinset and pearls and promises of prosperity.

She delivered too, after a shaky start. The City prospered, entrepreneurs became rock stars, council tenants bought their houses for knock-down prices and sold them on for fortunes. Money flowed, champagne did too, but it all went a bit too far. The Methodist in Maggie was apparently appalled by what the boys in red braces on the Square Mile did with her philosophies. By that time she had begun to believe her own post-Falklands hype and was going a bit mad before our eyes. Suddenly, she was hard to love. She had to go.

The loss hit us hard, though. What to believe in now? Nice Mr Major helped us through the break-up, but he was, well, boring. We shuffled along to the left after a while and met lovely Mr Blair, with his (then) dark, youthful features and perky charm. He was someone we could believe in again, someone we could love. A political Mr Darcy, if you like.

Tony had all the passion of the left but all the ruthlessness of the right. He told us we could keep the money we had made with Maggie and spend it on Oasis records and Damien Hirst dot paintings in the newly Cool Britannia.

Love was in the air and things could only get better, as the song said. They did, too, for a while. There was more cash for hospitals and schools, England even started winning cricket matches. The turnout was nearly 72 per cent in 1997, the year we fell for Tony and gave him a landslide victory. It fell below 60 per cent four years later, but that was because another landslide seemed inevitable.

Then came the terrible shock of 9/11, and our Tony began spending more time with his new friend George, over in the States. They talked of standing shoulder to shoulder and started picking fights together.

A million of us marched to try to stop them, but Tony wasn’t listening any more. There didn’t seem much point in voting after that, and the turnout in 2005 was only just above 61 per cent.

A dictator had fallen in Iraq, but the war that was supposed to make the world a safer place had made it much more dangerous. Tony seemed to have that same gleam in his eye that we had seen in Margaret, towards the end. He became harder to love. He had to leave us. It was for the best.

I hear he is doing well for himself, making lots of money overseas. That’s more than can be said for those he left behind.

Gordon was next, as we had always known he would be, but he was no comfort: he let the bankers run even wilder.

Then Dave came a-courting in his eco sneakers, but we were not convinced by his expensive manners. We were too hard and bitter to ever love again … that is, until Nick came along.

Lovely Nick, with his handsome face, thick hair and continental ways. “I agree with Nick,” became the catchphrase of the election in 2010. Turnout rose just a little to 65 per cent as hearts fluttered, Cleggmania struck and our new man made promise after promise.

He would stop tuition fees rising, he swore blind. He would abolish them. He would give us what we wanted, a better Britain. Only he could stop the Tories. We believed him. We loved him, for a short while. It was a brief but very intense holiday romance. Then we found him in bed with Dave.

Our hearts were broken again. Our hopes plummeted, even as tuition fees soared. We felt as if we had been lied to yet again, which is why Nick may get a kick up the backside in Sheffield on Thursday and lose his seat.

How could we have been so stupid? Easily, because all we want is something to believe in. Even now, with days to go.

Dave has been getting all pumped up and sweaty and telling us he feels “bloody lively”, but someone needs to let him know that a bit of mild swearing and a lack of Lynx is not the same as passion. Ed? Well, yeah. Ed was there when it all went wrong with Gordon, so he’s not exactly fresh.

But he does have a certain bumbling – sorry, smouldering – charm, and he popped in on Russell Brand last week to see if some of that famous Lothario’s sex appeal might rub off on him. Brand’s tactic of ignoring the ballot is futile, but his motives are understandable: “It is not that I am not voting out of apathy. I am not voting out of absolute indifference and weariness and exhaustion from the lies, treachery and deceit of the political class that has been going on for generations.”

MPs of all parties warned of a “crisis in voter apathy” last year, but Labour’s strategist, Douglas Alexander, dismissed that and said we were seeing a new kind of politics instead.

“It sells cries of protest to people who feel voiceless. And it claims to be ‘authentic’ by amplifying voters’ grievances, too often at the expense of any pretence that they will actually be resolved.”

As if to counter that, Ed has insisted he is “not seeking euphoria” at this election. There is no risk of that so far.

I’ve spent the past few months walking through constituencies from Inverness to Eastbourne, listening to voters (and non-voters) rather than politicians, and what I have heard most of all is that we are brokenhearted. We have had enough. We have fallen in love three times since the Seventies and really believed in the promises that were made, but it has always ended in tears.

Why should we believe anyone ever again?

And yet we do want to, secretly. We still want to think that there is someone out there for us, who will give us a fairer, better society. We are tempted by the idealists in the Greens, shambolic as they are, prone to brain freeze and able to start a fight in an empty room (see Brighton Council). They say all the right things, but are not quite life partner material yet. You wouldn’t trust them to put the cat out.

Some of us are tempted by the cynics in Ukip, full of fear as they are. Their clever manifesto is a billet-doux to disenchanted Labour voters in the North and Tories in the South. They would feed Tiddles all right, but you wouldn’t trust them not to upset the Polish plumber. That’s no good if your pipes are leaky.

Given all this, can anybody really blame us for staying home on Thursday night instead of keeping a date with the polling station after work? It’s such an old-fashioned way of doing things, anyway. Why can’t we vote on our phones? It works for Tinder, let alone Britain’s Got Talent – but Britain seems to have very little political talent at the moment, in the Take Me Out sense of the word: “Let the talent see the show!”

There is nobody who really excites us. Nobody we really trust to stick by their vows.

We’ve been burnt … and yet we are still in the game.

Pollsters predict the turnout could go back above 70 per cent this time, partly because it is so close there is a chance a vote might count for something.

So we are still looking, in these final days, for some little spark that will make us believe it is not all over and we don’t have to spend the rest of our days in lonely disillusionment.

Nicola doesn’t count, she’s not even standing.

So come on Ed, come on Dave. Come on Natalie, come on Nige, come on Leanne. Even you Nick, if you must. Come on. Turn us on. At least try.

But don’t blame us and our broken hearts if we find it just too hard to trust you.